Code Green

To be a good teacher, you need to be willing to learn as well as teach.  After three years teaching at the elementary level, I learned more than I signed up for!  As it pertains to the particular incident described further below, I will narrow those down to three.  

Lesson #1: Recess is a necessity for both you and the students.  You will need the break just as much if not more than them.

Lesson #2: There will be times that you have to laugh so you don't end up crying.

Lesson #3: You will experience (with multiple senses) more poop, pee, vomit or combination of the three at an elementary school than anywhere else except a hospital...possibly.

As a teacher, I strongly believe in Lesson 1.  I had recess every single day of the year.  If the weather was too bad to go out, we pushed the tables to the edges of the room and had a dance party inside. I loved recess with a passion!  I hated recess right after lunch, especially at the beginning of and end of the school year.  Texas heat, full stomachs, and strenuous physical activity do not make a very good mix.  I think you can see where this is going so if you don't have a strong stomach, you should probably stop reading right now.

Two weeks were left before the summer holiday.  The students were done.  The teachers were done.  The normal half hour recess was mysteriously extending to forty-five minutes.  The lunch menu that day had consisted of beef or chicken quesadillas, beans, rice, and, as always, a choice of white, chocolate, or strawberry milk.  There was not a cloud in the sky, the temperature was pushing 100 and the humidity was so high you'd think you were in a sauna.  The children were running, playing, and tumbling in the grass or on the playground sets.  When our time was up, no one wanted to go in, but go in we must. There were always two classes out at recess together so the other teacher and I called our classes to line up so we could trek back inside.  Before starting the last two hours of the day, we would always go to the bathroom, wash hands, and get some water.  Everything seemed like a perfectly normal day until some of the first students started finishing up and getting in line.  Then, the screaming started.

The bathrooms were designed with a slight blind spot to the left and right of the sinks, a little alcove where students dried their hands. I could tell the noise was coming from the left one and quickly moved to investigate.  I can honestly tell you that the next few minutes felt like something out of a slapstick comedy montage.  All it needed was an epic orchestral soundtrack and a major crescendo.  One of my smallest boys, we'll call him Billy, had thrown up partially on the floor and partially on the foot of another student, Bob.  I called his name, and as he looked up at me, he had another episode all over himself.  If I had not seen it coming from his mouth, I would have sworn it was from a different part of the body.  It smelled like it too.  Bob looks down at his foot, up at me, then back down at his foot, and finally up to the student who had just thrown up on him and is still throwing up.  Bob then threw up on Billy as well as the wall behind Billy.  Students are still coming out of the bathrooms.  Some are yelling, some are trying to get away, and some are starting to look a little green themselves.  I tell the students to avoid the mess, wash their hands and get in line as fast as possible.  It wasn't fast enough for Jill who promptly threw up into the girl's sink. Billy has finally stopped throwing up but is now crying. Bob is now puking in the corner.  Jill is still hunched over her sink. I guide Billy over to the clean sink to try to help him wash up as much as I can then go check on Bob. 

As all this was going on, my partner teacher had sent a student, Kelly, down to our classrooms to grab a trash can and another to the nurse's office and was watching the rest of our thirty odd students.  She was notorious around school for having a very weak stomach so anytime we had a code brown, code yellow or code green, I usually handled the students involved while she took care of the rest of our classes.  By the time our student was finally returning down the hall with the trash can, all of the yelling had stopped, all of our students except Billy, Bob and Jill were out and away from the line of fire, and all of the puking had finally stopped.  Or so I thought.  

My partner teacher had known we had a code green, but she had not seen any of it nor realized how many students were involved.  I can only imagine what it looked like.  There was vomit on the floor, on one one wall, covering two students and floating in one of the sinks.  Vomit that looked and smelled more like poop than vomit.  Kelly and the teacher just stopped and stared at myself and three students.  My fellow teacher starts gagging, and I could already tell what was going to happen. Kelly had been holding the trash can to her side, right in front of my team teacher.  Just as the teacher bends down to make use of the trash can, Kelly whips it from her side to the front to make use of it herself.  That grown woman, my coworker, ends up throwing up on the floor in the middle of the hallway in front of all our students just as the principal and school nurse finally arrive on the scene.  To make matters worse, the whole thing had been caught on camera. In all, it ended up being the worst code green in the history of the school involving four students, a teacher, and an unfortunate bathroom area.